"The performance of desktop computers increases year by year. This gives the programmers great opportunities to further improve the desktop experience of the users. However, what should you do when you have an old computer that is not capable of running the latest and hottest software? How can you benefit from the great software that is X.org when you can't run a desktop that takes advantage of its best features? No need for upgrading your PC, when you can have a usable alternative with the current one. Let me introduce you to Enlightenment E17 - the window manager with minimal hardware requirements that may amaze you."

Even GNOME with Nautilus is pretty cheap nowadays. The big DEs have mostly figured out where they hog memory and have begun to address these issues. Nautilus takes 13MB on my system, just barely edging out the weather applet.

If you really like your "lightweight" desktop, then go for it. But if your reasoning is that you want a lightweight desktop, then either you're trying to make do with 256MB of RAM, or you're kidding yourself.

I am not talking about just RAM. I am talking about speed. I am talking about quick redraw. I am talking about seeing the borders of the window I am dragging only once, and not twenty times.

I can have 768MB in my Celeron (not M) laptop, and I do, but it won't make the thing fast. None of the problems above did I experience under Windows, at least not to the extent I saw when I was using Gnome. That's why I changed to KDE (and tried Enlightenment and XFCE before), and it's much better now, but I still believe that the main problem is the slowness of GUI toolkits, and that does not seem to go away soon.

P.S. I know there is FLTK, but I have yet to see a serious application that uses it.